File recovery

My nephew was having problems with his Windows XP Pro. He started to load XP Home and it ask him it he wanted to format. He started the format and then stopped it before he got to 1%. My question, is the the files on this hard drive already gone eventhough he did not complete the format? If they are gone, is there a way to get the files back?

Thanks

 

Not sure about this it may depend on where the files were stored within the OS, he may have lost the data. Here is an excellent link on how to enpower "Recovery Console", give it a lot more DOS commands and allow access to all folders and to be able to copy to removable media. At least he will be able to explore around and find if the DIRs are still there and if so copy them. Have a look at the "1" article on both links and follow the links:

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-05-04.htm

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-05-01.htm
to
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187000225

Read twice and make sure you understand. Please ensure your nephew treats this as a learning experience and BACKS-UP before such activities in the future.

 

It may not even allow him to access the disk, as it has begun formatting, has no volume information

 

Okay we had a crook laptop last night (damaged boot sectors(.ini)) and we played with it for but naturally the above articles need you to tweak the reg (get into OS) but we didn't have that option. Strangely what we could do was plug in a mem stick, turn on the sys, get into recovery console and access the c:dir > copy to > e: (mem stick). Long story short we were able to get all data even with damaged boot.ini files, took a very long time as we couldn't use WildCards at the time but after we did a complete reinstall and did the tweak langa.com suggested and installed the recovery console on the system.